Scholarly Essay Presentation (10% of course grade):

This assignment is described as follows on the course Policies page on the blog:

Throughout the semester we will be reading and discussing together in class five scholarly articles/book chapters that relate to the central themes of the course. For each essay, 2-3 students will take responsibility for directing the first 15 minutes of class discussion of the assigned reading. These presentations should include a précis and response to the essay, followed by questions geared toward generating class discussion of the reading, all of this in relation to the larger course concerns. Each student will make one presentation throughout the semester. Students will sign up for these presentations on the second day of class.

More specifically, bear in mind the following as you prepare your presentation with your fellow presenters:

This is a GROUP project. You should all work together preparing the presentation, and you should all be equally involved in making the presentation to the class.

I would encourage each group, before it plans its presentation, to have an in-depth discussion of what each reader senses are the larger claims of the essay, its methods, its implications, and so on. It’s a good idea to ensure that you’ve performed a thorough reading of the essay before you attempt to organize your presentation. You’ll also want to consider it in terms of ongoing class conversations about the course topic (“Feeling Medieval”).

The purpose of your presentation is to help guide the rest of the class—who haven’t prepared the article or chapter as extensively as you have—through a consideration of the essay’s key points, explaining the author’s argument, and offering a response to it, before leading some discussion.

You have 15 minutes at the start of class for your presentation, before we’ve done any discussion of the reading.

You might wish to break it down into 5 minutes of summary, 5 minutes of analysis, and 5 minutes of guided full-class discussion. Feel free to use presentation software (PowerPoint, Keynote) to help highlight key moments of the essay as you work through your presentation.

Part of each group’s grade will depend on the nature of the discussion that follows the presentation. This means each group will need to think carefully about where the areas of dispute might be, in its assigned essay, and will need to structure questions for the class that will highlight those tensions and invite student response.

Scholarly Essay Presentation schedule

T 1-27 Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History”

Erin Stewart, Tamar Spann, Taylor Thompson

R 2-26 Rosenfeld, “Envy and Exemplarity in the Book of Margery Kempe”

Brandon Kolb, L’Kai Taylor, Caroline Boyce

T 3-17 McNamer, “Feeling”

Addie White, Josh Myers, Arianna Santos

R 3-19 Rosenwein, Introduction, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages

Ethan Smith, Emily James, Tanna Bolin

R 4-2 Trigg, “Emotional Histories: Beyond the Personalization of the Past and the Abstraction of Affect Theory”

Dylan Walsh, Melissa Peckham